Control of modern television receivers has become increasingly complicated in recent years, as more and more user-controllable features have been implemented by manufacturers in television receivers of ever-greater complexity. For example, in addition to the normal television receiver controls, some user-controllable features which were unheard-of just a few years ago are now commonly available to consumers, such as, COLOR TEMPERATURE, VIDEO NOISE REDUCTION, SURROUND SOUND, and SLEEP TIMER, just to name a few.
In an attempt to present an orderly array of these controllable functions, manufacturers introduced the concept of function control menus. In such well-known schemes, a menu is called up to the screen, and a particular function to be controlled, such as COLOR, is selected by the viewer for adjustment. Unfortunately, the menus soon grew too long for convenient screen display, and were expanded to include sub-menus allowing selection of related items. For example, selecting the menu item entitled VIDEO brings up yet another menu listing such related items as, BRIGHTNESS, CONTRAST, COLOR, TINT, SHARPNESS, COLOR TEMPERATURE, and VIDEO NOISE REDUCTION. While such an arrangement may seem straight-forward to a computer programmer, it may be extremely confusing, and even intimidating, to the average nontechnical user, who was quite happy to adjust the brightness of his receiver by turning a knob on the front panel, without having to wade through a mire of menus and submenus to accomplish that simple task. It is important to note that unlike the main menus found on today's receivers, the array of knobs on the front panels of yesterday's receivers formed an intuitive object-oriented guide which naturally, and in a nonconfusing fashion, led the viewer to the correct control for accomplishing his task.